264 HERON TRIBE 



the \-ountj would seem to indicate that spoonbills are descended from 

 dark-coloured ancestors, althouijh no such bird is now in existence. 



A brief reference may here be made to the tall and stately flamingo 

 {Phiriiicopterus roseus), which, with its lovely rose-tinted plumage and 

 its curiously bent beak — correlated with the unique habit of feeding 

 with the head in an in\erted position — is the typical representative of 

 a genus of birds which seems to hold a kind of intermediate position 

 between the stork group on the one hand and the ducks, swans, and 

 geese on the other. Xot that flamingoes are in any sense to be 

 regarded as the actual connecting link between these two groups, but 

 rather that all three are descended from a common ancestral stork. 

 In consequence of this somewhat intermediate character these birds 

 have been sometimes brigaded with the storks and at other times with 

 the ducks ; but the general view at the present day is to regard them 

 as the sole existing representatives of a distinct group — the Phoeni- 

 copteri — and this view is accordinglyadopted in this work. 



In general build flamingoes are stork-like birds, and they agree 

 with the members of that group in having a palate of the bridged type, 

 and with the storks themselves in the oval form of the nostrils in the 

 dry skull ; on the other hand they resemble the ibises, spoonbills, and 

 ducks in that the hind end of each half of the lower jaw is prolonged 

 far behind the point of its articulation with the skull in the form of a 

 hook-like process, while they approximate to the duck group alone in 

 that the beak is furnished with a number of transverse plates for the 

 purpose of straining off the water from their food, acting in the same 

 manner as the whalebone-plates of a whale. In the curiously bent 

 form of the beak in the adult — for in the young it is straight — 

 flamingoes are quite peculiar. As an instance of their intermediate 

 character between storks and ducks, it may be mentioned that on the 

 base of the skull there are often rudimentary surfaces for the articulation 

 of the bones of the palate ; such flat surfaces being absent in the 

 storks, but fully developed in the ducks and their kindred. Among 

 other characteristics, it will suffice to state that although flamingoes 

 have very large blind appendages (c.eca near the lower end of the 

 intestine, they lack featherless tracts on the sides of the neck, and that 

 the oil-gland is tufted and the wing furnished with twelve primary 

 quills. 



In the case of a bird which is such an extremely rare straggler to 

 the British Isles — even if the birds occasionally recorded there are 

 truly wild — it will be quite unnecessary to enter on the consideration 

 of the colouring of its plumage, its distribution, or its habits. Indeed, 



